Google Analytics is ten years old today. On November 11, 2005, Google officially launched Google Analytics. Google had recently acquired a company called Urchin Software and then rolled out a free version of the tool for public use. Before Google Analytics, web analytics tools were primarily only used by large tech and e-commerce companies – they were the only ones who could afford them.

Free analytics tools existed such as AWStats, but they weren’t always easy to implement for the less technologically-inclined, and the data was raw, unsegmented, and harder to interpret. With its colorful charts and graphs, Google Analytics made web traffic data more attractive, even fun, for lay people.

At the time Google Analytics was first released, I was working as a web content manager at an arts non-profit and blogging/freelance writing on the side. I remember compiling reports on “most viewed content” for my job and literally chasing people around the office with the ugly pie charts that AWStats had to offer. No one cared. A friend of mine, in passing, suggested that I use Google Analytics for a personal blog than I now no longer even keep up. Little did I know at the time Google Analytics would completely change the trajectory of my career. It also kind of ruined my writing career. If you’re a blogger, writer or digital content creator, it’s probably done both for you as well.

It’s hard to imagine a digital world that’s not completely dominated by data. Data is the fuel that (ostensibly) runs large businesses and small non-profits. The strength and viability of digital ventures is evaluated by web traffic data. Media startups live and die by tracking traffic data and the virality of content. Individual writers are encouraged to keep track of the pageviews that their content generates; these days, many writers’ livelihoods are based around the pageviews generated by their writing. You can lose your job if your work doesn’t generate a large enough audience. The concept of “writing for pageviews” is largely derided, but definitely understood.

But ten years ago, analytics was the great unknown for a lot of businesses and organizations, especially smaller ones. Digital was seen as a nebulous space, the “wild west,” and analytics seemed too technical and intimidating to be regularly tracked and evaluated. The general notion was that analytics, rather than being seen as an essential tool, had to be justified. At another job I had at a university, I had to repeatedly “make the case” for evaluating the performance of content via web analytics; I can’t imagine that being true at anywhere I’d work now. It happened so gradually I didn’t really notice it, because it all made sense. Of course analytics is important! It allows us to make sense of online user behavior and track trends. It legitimized digital for those fearful of investing in it, especially in those the media industry, which for years looked at the web and social media as frivolous and ephemeral. Google Analytics, in particular, emerged as the market leader for web analytics, in part because it was available for free and relatively easy to use.

GA made web analytics accessible to many entities (particularly small and medium sized businesses) that didn’t even realize such a tool existed, and educated professionals in a cross-section of industries about the basics of web traffic lingo. Now discussions of pageviews, unique visitors, and bounce rates became the norm in offices around the world. It’s used by more than half of all websites, and has become the standard by which all other tools are measured, because it’s one that most of us know.

In the years since I had to argue in defense of analytics at my job, it slowly became more and more of my work until it became the focus of my career. I put on workshops and training sessions on Google Analytics, I wrote articles, I enrolled in courses in Javascript, Excel, and data analysis. I even started a business focused on teaching people about web analytics. Analytics has been good to me, but somehow along the way, analytics became a much more insidious tool, especially for those of us who are content creators. For me, the tool I championed as a web content manager eventually came back to bite me in the ass as a writer. Pageviews, or at least volume of pageviews, became a shorthand for audience interest. In 2008, when Gawker’s Nick Denton started to pay writers based around the traffic they generated, the standard had been set. The age of pageview publishing and content mills had begun and, at least for awhile, there was no going back.

As a writer that also worked as a data analyst, I sometimes regret how much of a champion I was of analytics in the early days, at least when it comes to blogging and content. When I teach classes about writing for the web, it’s troubling to me how much more interested some students are in learning about how to analyze pageviews than how to actually be a good writer. It bugs me that in addition to doing content based work, so many writers are now expected to work as one-person web analytics departments and that the number of pageviews a post gets is sometimes viewed as the only measure of its value. A lot of fantastic writing gets overlooked that way. Sometimes I feel like my early hyper-enthusiasm among bloggers and publishers about Google Analytics as a tool contributed to that perspective.

To be fair, I’m not saying that Google Analytics specifically led to the rise of clickbait, but the availability of Google Analytics contributed to a mainstream understanding of web traffic data that I think was misused by many industries eager to find a way to prove value to their digital efforts.

I semi-retired from web analytics work about two years ago, for multiple reasons, but the most important one was that becoming data-driven turned me into a data analyst, when I am in fact, a writer. Even though I returned to writing and editing as a career, Google Analytics is still a daily part of my life. I still teach workshops and write about analytics regularly but instead of being a cheerleader and evangelist, I spend a lot of time talking about it’s limitations and encouraging writers to put more stock in their own writing voice than pageviews. For good or ill, all of us who work in digital publishing are data-focused now, but it’s also up to us to push back when we can individually and as an industry, letting data guide us, but not drive us in directions we aren’t meant to go.

That being said, happy birthday to you, Google Analytics. You did change my life, and definitely increased my hourly rate, so I am super-grateful to you for that.

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What rights do people have to accuracy in their publicly available information? What limits should there be for who has access to our data souls?

Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press 2015) is an important book, not only for those interested in privacy and data, but also anyone with larger concerns about the growing tension between transparency and trade secrets, and the deceptiveness of pulling information from the ostensibly objective “Big Data.”

Starting from issues involving digital reputations, Pasquale writes about how the “black boxes” that companies containing personal information can be morphed, queried, and molded in ways that can negatively impact both individuals and groups. Presently, under U.S. law, people don’t own their own data – the data brokers do – and this allows for both inaccuracies and more surveillance. But database-gathered secret information “is valuable only if it is exclusive, and it remains exclusive only if the full power of the state can be brought to bear on anyone who discloses it without authorization” (215)

But The Black Box Society also writes about the underlying inequities that supposedly neutral coding hard-bakes into so many systems, including financial systems and transactions. While that is far from my area of expertise, these sections are hard-hitting – and will be of interest to those interested in the commodification and legalizing of inequality. Pasquale writes about how these hidden algorithms aren’t objective at all – instead “subtle but persistent racism” or other biases “may have influenced the past” and initial settings for seemingly objective algorithms – and then what happens now impacts “present [] models as neutral, objective, nonracial indicia.” (41)

The Black Box Society also touches on other issues of inequality – such as the ways that sharing information of some people has more of an impact on those people than others. (For more about the gendered aspect of online reputation and dispersal of information, I strongly suggest Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace – and the recent accompanying Boston University Law Review symposium.)

One of the most important aspects of The Black Box Society builds on the work of Siva Vaidhyanathan and others to write about how relying on the algorithms of search impact people’s lives. Through our inability to see how Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other companies display information, it makes it seem like these displays are in some way “objective.” But they are not. Between various stories about blocking pictures of breastfeeding moms, blocking links to competing sites, obscurity sources, and not creating tools to prevent harassment, companies are making choices. As Pasquale puts it: “at what point does a platform have to start taking responsibility for what its algorithms go, and how their results are used? These new technologies affect not only how we are understood, but also how we understand. Shouldn’t we know when they’re working for us, against us, or for unseen interests with undisclosed motives?”

Pasquale also argues that obscuring information also make it easier for those in positions of power to focus not on what would do good, but what appears to benefit those not only in positions of power, but specifically avoiding the creation of data systems that benefit those they claim to want to support. In regards to the recently defeated SOPA legislation, Pasquale asks “What does it say about our Congress that it is readier to turbo-charge a police state, largely in the service of content industry oligopolists, that is to revise and expand a venerable licensing method to support struggling journalists, artists, and musicians?” (203) The present payment model for those who receive royalties and license fees is so clearly broken, but data – and data engineers – could do much good if the focus was on actually paying those that create content.

Much of what Pasquale is concerned about could be changed easily. But to do so, would take those who work with data to understand how their work could potentially be used – and to create greater degrees of privacy through obscuring information. After all, more precise granularity exposes private information in a creepy way. Additionally, systems are created by people, and even Pasquale writes about how his suggestions are dismissed at the Silicon Valley companies where he raises these issues. To make the changes happen that are suggested in The Black Box Society will take intense social pressure – and perhaps a Supreme Court that understands that sharing inaccurate information is a violation of as-of-today yet-to-be defined privacy right that is nevertheless in the Constitution.

Summary: An essential book for understanding the algorithms that control much of our lives – from financial institutions to health information. Overall, the impact of this book will only come over years, with academics, policy makers, and others, quoting and implementing The Black Box Society’s suggestions.

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Inspired by a brief residency at the Royal Mint, UK-based artist Heidi Hinder became fascinated with society’s emotional and social connection to money, more specifically, the role that physical currency plays in an age where digital financial transactions are increasingly the norm. Hinder, an artist and maker with training in metalsmithing and jewelry-making, wanted to explore the impact a coinless future could have on financial interactions. What would happen, for example, if financial value was no longer symbolized by something we can hold, see or touch? “Money as a system is based on trust,” said Hinder. “As coins become obsolete, I wanted to know what effect it would have socially and economically.”

Hinder explores this question through an interactive research project called Money no Object, which uses wearable technology and digital payment systems to delve into the connection between physical and emotional currency. The project, done in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, allows visitors to the V&A to make a financial donation to the museum through four physical gestures: the choice of a handshake, a hug, a high-five, or for the performance-minded, a tap-dance. Hinder wanted to encourage interaction through “intentionally playful” gestures that one would be more inclined to try with a stranger. Hinder herself is the recipient of the handshake, hug, and high-five gestures that power the financial interactions. “I felt very loved!” she says with a laugh. “People can be reticent to get close [at first] but in time their reactions were surprisingly open. People wanted to have a conversation – about the technology itself, and philosophical issues about money, and the economy.”

Conversation was exactly Hinder’s intent behind Money no Object. The project was based around Hinder’s own personal concerns about the financial sustainability of being an artist. “On a broader level, it’s also looking at how arts and culture is valued in society as well as the effects of how we spend, and how we interact with money.”
Originally started as a three-month residency project at Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio, Hinder received research and development funding from incubators Creativeworks London and UnLtd, to further develop the technology behind the Money No Object project with V&A. Funding allowed Hinder to continue development with the assistance of Seb Madgwick, one of the engineers behind musician Imogen Heap’s wearable music software project, Mi.Mu. The wireless RFID technology used by the financial services industry to track consumer transactions was similarly used to power the gloves and badges in the four physical transactions behind the Money no Object project. (The code behind Money no Object is available on GitHub)

Additionally, each of the physical movements was coded with a specific color in order to collect data on the transactions and to create a visual representation of a gesture as it happens. Hinder found that the hug and handshake actions were the more popular transactions, while “children were much more extroverted” and preferred the Tap & Pay wearable payment system. Overall, Hinder says the response to Money No Object has been encouraging and receptive by V&A visitors. “People we’ve talked to have been keen to see it put in place [at other museums and cultural institutions].”

While Hinder continues to partner with V&A on Money No Object project, she hopes that the technology behind Money no Object can potentially power similar non-profit and cultural projects, and is on the lookout for further research funding. “There’s a lot of potential here to explore the value of a cultural visit through this project, and start a broader conversation about money, material value, and the emotional currency involved.”

In the seventh episode (fifth trope) of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, “Women as Reward,” Anita Sarkeesian is taking on the idea that a woman serves only—or primarily—as a reward for the (presumably male) player or player-character succeeding at a mission or at the whole game. Even before the episode begins, Princess Peach comes to mind, as do hundreds of princesses in fairy tales the world over.

It also reminds me of the fairy tale minigame in Contrast, in which the princess in question decides she’d rather go off and rescue herself, thank-you-very-much. (If you don’t know about Contrast, my review of it is here on TLF.) My point is that this is another one of those tropes that isn’t inherent to videogames alone; it’s a long-standing (and long-annoying, if you ask me) trope that has been a part of literary and cinematic narratives for centuries.

That doesn’t, by the way, make it any less sexist or annoying. The “male hero does thing in order to get the girl” (which is usually a nice way to say “get laid”) trope is old, tired, and objectifying, and thus a worthy target for criticism. So let’s see what Sarkeesian does with it.

Sarkeesian begins with Metroid. Oh, boy.

Metroid, for what it’s worth, has a female protagonist, which immediately makes most people assume that it gets a pass from a series like Sarkeeian’s which is targeting negative tropes about women in gaming. And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised. Samus Aran is, in my opinion, one of the best female characters in games, particularly given her early advent in 1986 (see my discussion of Samus as a feminist gaming icon here on TLF). But that is not to say that there aren’t problems with the way Samus appears in games, particularly in her (potential) final appearance in the 1987 game, and—especially—in The Other M.

The problem with Metroid’s conclusion is that the reveal of Samus’s female identity is designed as a reward, as Sarkeesian rightly points out when she explains that “the two best endings…reveal Samus in various states of undress.” The better a player is, the fewer articles of clothing Samus is wearing (armor, then a leotard, then a bikini), and the more her “sexuality” is featured explicitly as a reward. This shouldn’t detract from the fact that she is still a powerful female character, but these conclusions (because the pattern continues throughout the games) do continue to objectify Samus’s female body as a prize.**

Sarkeesian continues with a more standard interpretation of the trope: a series of clips in which scantily clad and buxom women drape themselves on male player-characters in racing games, fighting games, and single-player games. She continues with the “victory sex” or “rescue sex” reward scenes – scenes in which female NPCs agree to have sex with the player-character (becoming more graphic in more contemporary games) in return for having been saved (or for the player-character saving the world). In some games, players even receive achievements or trophies for having sex with these NPCs (Sarkeesian refers to this as “trophyism,” and links it to the concept of straight male entitlement), or for other, more ‘minor’ sexual conquests, such as staring at NPCs’ breasts or up their skirts.

Sarkeesian doesn’t take the time here to distinguish between a couple of generic video game conventions. While there certainly are games that make use of more casual “rescue sex” encounters between player-characters and NPCs, there are quite a few games (RPGs, primarily) which contain romance-missions in which players attempt to build relationships between player-characters and NPCs, often NPCCs (non-player companion characters, or characters who follow the player-character and interact frequently with the player-character in conversations and during combat and exploration).

In romance missions, the player is “rewarded” for their relationship with an NPCC (or NPC) through a romantic, often sexual, encounter, which could ostensibly cause this type of scene to fall into Sarkeesian’s schema of “victory sex.” However, the purpose of romance missions is not explicitly to foreground sex (although the degree to which the developers choose to titillate players by revealing—or not—the bodies of the player-character and NPCC in question varies by game and by pairing), but to foreground the relationship, as the mission often extends over the entirety of the game and typically contains only one (or a few) explicitly sexual encounters. Some games—notably, titles like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, as well as Skyrim—do not restrict the gender of the player-character or the NPCC in these missions, meaning that a male character might well be the “reward” in question (not all games restrict these relationships to heterosexual, either, for what it’s worth, a point which Sarkeesian touches on slightly when mentioning the outrage of straight male players at encountering gay romance options in BioWare titles).

I think it’s important here to acknowledge that there are ways in which sex (or romance) as reward is complicated by the inclusion of these types of non-essential missions, since the purpose of “romance” missions often focuses on the establishment of an emotional connection between the characters, rather than an exclusively sexual one. This is not to say that all instances of “victory sex” ought to be excused as “romances”; there are far more instances of objectifying “victory sex” than there are romantic sexual culminations.

This trope ties in with a later one—sexual conquest as a source of XP (experience points), which players then use to increase their abilities or health (as in God of War or Grand Theft Auto). Here, the sexual encounter provides a dual reward—both the encounter itself and the XP the player earns by participating in it, designed, Sarkeesian notes, to “validate the masculinity of presumed straight male players.” It not only reduces women to “experience point dispensers,” but reinforces the false suggestion that masculinity must rely upon a male’s ability to conquer female bodies, making this particular version of the trope problematic in terms of both male and female gender politics.

Putting this aside, Sarkeesian moves on to easter eggs and cheat codes which unlock explicit content, including alternate starting screens with topless women, NPCs with expanding breasts as a reward for tricks performed, and player-characters and NPCs in various states of undress during cutscenes and gameplay. She points out that these are not “glitches,” but intentional inclusions “on the part of the designers,” which, while accurate, does rather suggest that all designers are complicit in the inclusion of these instances, which seems less than accurate. In fact, it may be that some are the result of programmers’ or artists’ interference, rather than designers—or even earlier models which were discarded in favor of characters in more clothing but which were not removed from the game’s programming for fear of causing glitches (although I would venture that a fair number were intentionally included as a ‘joke’ or easter egg, but that doesn’t mean that all the developers were aware of or complicit in their existence). It’s also worth noting that some of these come from mods generated by players, rather than developers, then shared. I don’t say this to excuse their existence (which is rather objectifying and exploitative), simply as a point of clarification which might exonerate the otherwise-demonized figure of the designer.

As she moves on to things like unlockable costumes and collectables (the costumes are often scanty or sexually revealing, and collectables might include photographs, magazines, or other sexualized objects). It is clear that there’s a disparity between the kinds of costumes unlocked for male versus female characters. While male characters often get more “badass” armor or humorous costumes, female characters (even, Sarkeesian notes, those otherwise appropriately dressed) typically end up with “sexy NOUN” outfits (“sexy nurse,” “sexy schoolgirl,” “sexy pirate,” etc.) which are “completely inappropriate for the mission at hand.”

On a side note, I appreciated Sarkeesian’s scorn for Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015)’s “urban ninja costume,” or, in her words, “whatever the hell this is supposed to be,” while noting that the male protagonist is in a full commandant’s uniform. I also liked that Sarkeesian provided alternatives here—Alice: Madness Returns (2011) offers thankfully non-sexy costumes for its protagonist, although the game itself is otherwise rather poorly designed.

As Sarkeesian’s series has matured, she has become more aware of the problems introduced in the early episodes, and she has made a deliberate effort to make her later episodes more complex and nuanced, including positive examples alongside the negative ones and going out of her way to show a few more in-depth discussions instead of a long laundry-list of issues. This is probably the best episode in the series thus far (and is definitely better than either of the episodes in her Positive Female Characters spin-off series) just in terms of its attention to details, both positive and negative.

That said, I am skeptical that the series itself will be able to be called ‘successful,’ and this skepticism has very little to do with the relative quality of the series. Near the end of the video, Sarkeesian leaves behind videogames, and enters into a very serious discussion of straight male entitlement, sexual harassment, and rape culture, a conversation which I’m afraid will largely alienate those male gamers who might have otherwise been sympathetic to her points about games. Sadly, the discussion is one that needs to be had, although I’m uncertain whether Sarkeesian is the person to do it—not because she isn’t qualified, but because of the reputation she has acquired as a ‘feminazi’ or ‘man-hater.’

And I think that this is ultimately what I think is the biggest problem with Sarkeesian’s series: it isn’t going to reach the people who really need to see it, and if it does, they aren’t going to be open to the points she’s trying to make. The people who watch Sarkeesian’s videos do so because they either agree with her or they intentionally don’t want to agree with her; there are few people who watch the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series because they genuinely have an interest in learning about the problems of gender representation in games.